Declan Patrick MacManus had neither a name nor a band that anyone cared to remember in late 1976. If anything made an impression, it was his obscenely large spectacles. The son of a dance band singer and a record department manager, Declan sang away his weekends fronting the country-rockers Flip City, while working weekdays feeding punch cards into room-size computers. Unlike his colleagues, Declan realized rock stardom was imminent and consequently had mastered the art of showing up at the offices of record labels. Once there, with guitar in hand, he gave the executives an audience, rather than demanding an audition.
It's little wonder he wasn't signed until he mailed out demos. Stiff Records chief Jake Riviera heard one, and MacManus' literacy convinced the would-be mogul that he'd found Motown's Holland-Dozier-Holland all in one person. It was the urgency of Declan's voice that told Stiff's house producer, ex-Brinsley Schwarz bassist Nick Lowe, that the indie label had found its first talent. MacManus got a label, a producer, and a name: Elvis Costello. In the earliest instance of his subversive iconoclasm, he mated the King's name to that of his grandmother mostly because he thought "Elvis was a better name than Jesus and almost as exclusive."

      Elvis' extraordinary curse is to be a Technicolor member of the black-and-white world. His songs start like power pop, but their twisted melodic inventiveness becomes the perfect counterpart to his stunningly articulate lyrics. He aims for the truth and he's never better than when he is exposing unacceptable optimism. Elvis never rings false, despite the dangers posed by the reflexive wordplay and his inability to keep his narrators out of their own songs. Elvis' chosen space is the margins of our society, and he shows us that what we thought was the safe center is actually the cutting edge.

      Elvis came to Stiff with acoustic music and left "surfing the new wave" with 1977's My Aim Is True. Here he first presents his bittersweet view of a society caught in the clutches of businessmen and savagely warped out of its humanity. Intensity comes from his voice's uninflected, matter-of-fact delivery, a style he mastered from years of shouting over indifferent pub audiences. The invariable first-person narration rejects the comforts of distance, and the pithy writing makes it impossible for us to escape. "Welcome to the Working Week" takes only two minutes to dissect the stultifying reality of adulthood, and "Mystery Dance" captures the awkwardness of adolescent sex. The Stiff-provided backing band, the Clovers, provides anachronistic relief from the very contemporary and darkly cynical lyrics.

      As a guitar player, Elvis is not a melody maker, and even today he remains traumatized by the bloated solos of the mid-'70s' dinosaur rockers. He uses his Fender to create sonic texture, although his fans continue to suspect he's a more skillful guitarist than the concise punk-based structure of his three-chord songs might suggest.

      Elvis belonged to the fringe of the punk scene; from the beginning, his songwriting style and big-band background set him apart. He was too slick for the punkers and too punk for the slicksters. He certainly doesn't belong in a media-created catchall like "new wave." He was never drawn into what many suspected was the movement's manufactured rebellion and alternative conformity. When he went shopping for a band after My Aim Is True, authentic punk credentials were not on his mind. From the want ads he found two unrelated Thomases, Bruce and Pete, who became respectively his melody-carrying bassist and his drummer, with Keith Moon-size ambitions. From the Royal College of Music, he poached Stephen Nason, a pianist whose only previous rock exposure had been an early Alice Cooper concert which earned him the sobriquet Steve Nieve. In trademark style, Elvis made light of his mates' scruffy, unassuming appearance by christening them the Attractions.

      The new combo's first outing, 1978's This Year's Model, is Costello's adolescent masterpiece. With the swinging Clovers, Elvis could do little more than mine punk's subversive potential as an outside observer. Now with a band capable of expressing his attitude, he opened up full throttle. Elvis' narrator has stumbled into our world, and he can't stop for breath as he makes us aware of its cruelty and injustice. Telephones never connect, cars don't take you where need to go, cameras snoop instead of snapping shots, and guns kill you instead of the burglar. It's impossible to forget the invective of "This Year's Girl" or "(I Don't Want to Go To) Chelsea." Yet the tunes were the very opposite of depressing because Elvis and the Attractions distill punk and power pop into a singularly uplifting organ-driven beat. Elvis had found his signature style, which, in redefining the options of punk, gained for his subsequent release the largest audience of his career.

      Armed Forces was the definitive, post-Vietnam protest album. Elvis reminds us it's the old men who start the wars and that the volunteers in the trenches are not the enemy but the victims. This is Elvis at his most political, setting aside the self-deprecation and calculating cool to step into a more provocative role. The Attractions did their part to create catharsis with an upbeat mix of quasi-'60s rock reminiscent of the pre-psychedelic Beatles and the Byrds.

      Elvis and company chose an appropriately ironic title for their next release, 1980's Get Happy!! The album was Costello's homage to the American R&B tradition that has sustained British rock since its inception. It was reputedly produced as penance for a disastrous brawl on their 1979 American Armed Forces tour that devolved into racial slurs. The band's constant touring had tightened its unmistakably extreme sound into the perfect medium for transforming the sound of Motown and Stax classics into rocking originals like "Opportunity" and "King Horse." This cross-fertilization resulted in what is arguably the band's tightest album. With virtually all of its 20 songs under three minutes, the album is a testament to Elvis' power that its challenging lyrics can be both deeply personal and intellectually moving.

      Changes were apparent on 1981's Trust. The seriously ironic lyrics of "Clubland" and "New Lace Sleeves" replaced straight-up laments of broken love and injustice with world-weary ambiguity and oblique volleys against misspent youth. Trust showed that Elvis had tempered his anger. Continuing the band's breakneck album-a-year pace, Costello and the Attractions released Imperial Bedroom in 1982, and they surprised their fans by replacing producer Nick Lowe with one-time Beatles engineer Geoff Emmerick. The band evoked the jazzier sound of pre-British Invasion pop; "Man Out Time" suggested Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, if he happened to have been in an introspective mood.

      Imperial Bedroom introduced the balladry that has become the defining feature of Costello's late '80s and '90s work. The notable exceptions were Blood and Chocolate (1986) and Brutal Youth (1994), conscious attempts to recapture the organ and electric guitar sound of This Year's Model. Elvis' quintessentially British crooning has unified such stylistically disparate outings as King of America (1986), a series of tightly wound narratives featuring the members of the other Elvis' TCB band; Mighty Like a Rose (1991), a collection of meticulously textured tone poems; and Painted From Memory (1998), a fully orchestrated collaboration with Elvis' longtime hero Burt Bacharach. This album signifies a certain closure: Costello's first cover was a 1977 version of Bacharach and Hal David's " I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself." In all likelihood, Bacharach would have had nothing to do with the snarling Elvis of the late '70s; it's a testament to his latter-day sophistication that the two met as equals 20 years later.

      The raw quality of the early Elvis has been replaced with mature ballads and sonic experimentation, but the results continue to be marked by Elvis' healthy skepticism, his smart wordplay, and his desire to explore the varied roots of pop music. His work has lost neither its urgency nor its poignancy. His aim, as always, is true.